Defiant Cruz booed off stage by furious crowd
Donald Trump’s attempt to showcase a unified Republican Party was crushed in a chorus of boos on Wednesday when former rival Ted Cruz was jeered off the convention stage after refusing to endorse Trump and urging conservatives to vote with their “conscience” rather than their party.
Cruz received a rapturous reception for most of his soaring address, devoted to the theme of freedom.
But the mood descended into unbridled rage when the Texas senator delivered an unsubtle rebuke of Trump’s unorthodox policy agenda and asked conservatives to “vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”
The wild scene on the convention floor in Cleveland, a shocking departure from the traditional infomercial-style scripted smiles of the major party shindig, distracted from a critical prime-time speech by Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, Mike Pence, who remains an unknown to much of the country.
And it highlighted, to a large national audience, the extent to which the freshly minted Republican nominee still discomforts prominent members of his own party.
Pence, the governor of Indiana, introduced himself to the nation with a selfdeprecating biographical addresss he began with his standard introduction: “I’m a Christian, I’m a conservative and I’m a Republican, in that order.”
After joking about his obscurity and dullness, the low-key social conservative delivered a lengthy recommendation of Trump’s qualities as a leader, changemaker, straight shooter and all-around good man.
“As we say back home, you can’t fake good kids,” Pence said to loud applause.
He soon pivoted to an assault on Clinton, describing her as the "secretary of the status quo" and blaming her for what he said were a series of foreign policy disasters under U.S. President Barack Obama.
Even before Cruz took the stage, the proceedings at Quicken Loans Arena had the everybody-nod-and-smile mood of a reunion imposed on a dysfunctional family by a domineering patriarch.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spoke only by recorded video, without introduction, though he urged the party to stop its “fighting.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich spoke to two state delegations in the afternoon and then continued his boycott of the home-state convention itself.
And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has done little to hide his distaste for Trump, issued an endorsement that conspicuously focused almost entirely on the threat of Hillary Clinton.
“The simple truth is: Liberal Washington insiders created our problems. And Hillary Clinton is the ultimate liberal Washington insider. If she were any more on the ‘inside,’ she’d be in prison,” Walker said. “America deserves better than Hillary Clinton. That is why we need to support Donald Trump and Mike Pence.”
The unresolved intra-party tension was brought into the open by the second speaker of the night, rightwing talk radio firebrand Laura Ingraham, who demanded that “all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos” honour their primaryseason pledge to support the nominee, a clear reference to Cruz.
But Cruz has long shown a willingness to make people mad, and he refused to bow to pressure from the Trump campaign, party leaders and his own state’s delegation. Instead, he delivered a paean to personal and economic freedom, a traditional Republican theme that has rarely been discussed at a Trumpified convention more interested in strength and enemy-crushing.
The speech served as a kind of revenge for a man whose wife Trump suggested is ugly and whose father Trump suggested had a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And it sets him up for a near-certain candidacy in 2020 in the event Trump loses this year.
“Did we live up to our values? Did we do all we could? That’s really what elections should be about. That’s why you and millions like you devoted so much time and sacrifice to this campaign. We’re fighting, not for one particular candidate or one campaign, but because each of us wants to be able to tell our kids and grandkids . . . that we did our best for their future, and for our country,” Cruz said. “America is more than just a land mass between two oceans. America is an idea, a simple yet powerful idea: freedom matters.”
The speech so infuriated the party that, according to CNN, a man in a suite reserved for big donors had to be restrained from assaulting him.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich ad-libbed an attempted rebuttal to Cruz, arguing that Trump is the only candidate in the election who will indeed uphold the Constitution. The Trump supporters in the crowd shouted their approval.
For the most part, though, the mood on the floor of the arena was angry again.
By the middle of the second speech, the delegates had chanted “Lock Her Up” three times, demonstrating again how popular the once-fringe suggestion of imprisoning Clinton has become with the new Republican mainstream. Ingraham earned one of the loudest cheers of the whole convention, a raucous standing ovation, when she accused the media of failing to report on the “phonies” and “frauds” she said Trump has exposed.
For a third straight night, speakers depicted the United States as a country mired in dire problems caused by the ineptitude and weakness of Clinton and Obama.
“Today, America is in terrible, world-record-high debt. Our economy is not growing. Our jobs are going overseas. We have allowed our military to decay. And we project weakness on the international stage,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in the first speech of the night.
Scott offered the convention’s first explicit acknowledgment of many Americans’ unease with Trump, conceding that he’s “sometimes not polite” and “can be a little rough.” But he urged voters to consider Clinton’s flaws and the high stakes.
“This election is about the very survival of the American Dream.”
The roster of speakers was far less eclectic than the curious hodgepodge of the previous two nights, when rising party politicians competed for time with obscure celebrities. Among the other Wednesday speakers were retired astronaut Eileen Collins, the candidate’s son Eric Trump, and businessman Phil Ruffin, who testified to Trump’s work ethic and management savvy.
An unexpected moment was delivered by a black woman identified as the Trumps’ “senior family assistant.” Breaking with standard Republican rhetoric on Black Lives Matter and race relations, Lynne Patton said black lives have “historically” mattered less in the U.S. and still do to some Americans. Not to her boss, she said.
“As a minority,” she said, “I personally pledge to you that Donald Trump knows that your life matters, he knows that my life matters.”